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Saturday, 9 July 2016

While I was reading various forums on Gmail, I came across many user queries that were asking for ways to convert Gmail to EML files.
So I researched on the various methods through which you could successfully export Gmail messages to EML.

We all are aware of the fact that web-based clients such as Gmail will be with us only till the internet connection stays with us. So, in order to be able to access the Gmail emails offline, we need to export Gmail messages to hard drive.

Let us consider the query of the user and try to analyse his requirements:

“Hi,
I am going on a meeting to a rural suburban area. I may or may not have internet connectivity there. I need to have backup of some of my important emails as they contain really important data and I cannot rely on the internet completely. So to be on the safer side I was thinking, if it is possible to backup Gmail messages to hard drive? ”

PROPOSED SOLUTION TO EXPORT GMAIL TO EML FILES IS:

The user can export her Gmail emails in EML file format and save these EML files on her local drive.
This is best suitable because;
EML files can be accessed by most of the open source emails clients. So you will just have to install an open source email client before you go for the meeting and then you will be able to access those important EML files without the internet connection too.

Now after talking about the needs to export Gmail to EML files, let us now discuss about various ways in which we can achieve our target.

LEARN HOW TO EXPORT GMAIL EMAILS TO EML

Now we will explore the ways through which you can export your Gmail emails to EML files. There two methods by which you can export Gmail to EML files. Let’s discuss them one by one.

METHOD 1- MANUAL METHOD

After doing research on how we can export Gmail to EML files manually; I found out that there is no direct method for this.
The manual method to backup Gmail to EML file contains the following steps:

Login to your Gmail account on the web browser.

Open the email that you want to save as eml file.

Select “Show original”, see the below picture to know where to find this option:

A source code page will open which is as the following image:

Press Ctrl+A and copy all the content of that source page using Ctrl+C.

Paste the copied content to a text file and save the text file with the .eml extension.

Then you can open the .eml file with any open source client (for eg, Mozilla Thunderbird).

LIMITATIONS TO EXPORT GMAIL TO EML FILES MANUALLY ARE AS FOLLOWS:

You need to follow the above steps with each and every email that you need to export to eml file.

This is time-consuming

This doesn’t allow bulk conversion of the emails.

This method doesn’t allow you to export calendars & contacts to your local drive.

METHOD 2- USING AUTOMATED METHOD

As seen above, there are various limitations of manual method to export Gmail to EML files, so we can go with the alternative method which is using a third-party tool to export Gmail messages to hard drive.

We can select a tool which does the following:

export Gmail emails in bulk to EML file.

export Gmail contact to EML file.

export Gmail calendar to EML file.

export Gmail photo to EML file.

While looking for such tool, I came across a tool which performs the tasks mentioned above. It is “SysTools Gmail Backup” which is a trusted software as I have seen good customer reviews about this product.

CONCLUSION

I hope this blog was helpful and it justified it’s purpose of helping you to export Gmail to EML files. So I hope to see you soon with my new blog on tips and tricks that would make your problems easy to handle.